Cooking tips and techniques that come handy in your.

Saturday, January 9, 2016

Welcome to my second Spiralizer Saturday! As part of my January health kick I’m going to use my spiralizer for dinner once a week as a way to get myself eating more vegetables, fewer carbs and generally have a healthier meal.

If you have a recipe that can be made using a spiralizer please add it to the linkup at the end of this post.

I actually made this recipe a couple of weeks ago to use up some leftover cooked sausages from a new year’s buffet at my fiance’s mum’s house. She is vegetarian so gave us all the leftover sausages to take home! I wanted to find a recipe I could use them in and had the idea of chopping them up and making into a sort of ragu (a meat-based sauce), to serve over spaghetti for my fiancé and with butternut squash noodles for me (he won’t eat butternut squash but I was dying to try it in my spiralizer!). So here’s my recipe:

Sausage Ragu with Butternut Squash Noodles – an original recipe from Caroline Makes

Serves 2

Sausages: if standard size, 2-3 per person. If chipolata, you will probably want more. The sausages can be raw or cooked – see instructions below.

Fry Light or 1 tbsp oil

Half an onion, chopped

400g tin chopped tomatoes

Pinch of salt

½ tsp oregano

1 whole butternut squash

If you are using raw sausages, chop with scissors and fry them with the onion in a little oil until cooked. If using leftover cooked sausages, fry the onion as above then when the onion is translucent, add the chopped cooked sausage.

Put the tomatoes, salt, oregano and 100ml water in the pan and simmer until the sauce has reduced.

Meanwhile peel the butternut squash and cut the ends off so each end is flat. Place in the spiralizer and choose whether you want thin spaghetti style noodles or thicker, fettucine style – I went for the thicker ones for a change as I hadn’t done that before.

There are various ways you can cook spiralized veg - boil, or rather blanch, as they only take a couple of minutes; fry in Fry Light or similar, or oven bake. I already had the oven on as I was serving my fiancé's ragu with spaghetti and doing him garlic bread as well so laid out the butternut squash noodles on a baking tray, sprayed them with Fry Light and roasted them in the oven for about 15 minutes. They turned out really well.

Serve the ragu over the top and enjoy.

If you have a recipe that can be made using a spiralizer please add it to the linkup below.